Music is a school subject facing difficult times. In England, fewer students are taking the subject at GCSE, not enough people are training to become secondary music teachers, and the subject is suffering from a lack of funding.
One problem may be that the way music is taught in school has become increasingly formal. The current music national curriculum, introduced in 2014, includes using staff notation, learning music history, and listening to the music of “great composers and musicians”. This was a shift in comparison to the previous, more child-centred national curriculum.
Wider education policy on how future teachers should be trained places emphasis on teacher control and well-structured lessons – again, perpetuating more formal, traditional approaches.
But this isn’t how many popular musicians – the artists students may be listening to on their way into school – learn how to play music. Their approach is often more informal. Many learn to play by ear, hearing a piece of music and figuring it out on an instrument.
